- The BBC is the world's
oldest and biggest
public service broadcaster.
Globally, around 450
million people every week
come to the BBC in all of its languages.
The BBC has been right at the forefront
of using whatever technology is around,
and really, our job now is to say
what are the media of the future?
- Beeb is the BBC's end to end customized
digital voice assistant,
and it's really there
as a vehicle for our audiences to explore
the full panoply of BBC
content and services over time.
- And so we were looking for
somebody who could help us
do that fast, but also, and crucially,
to do it in a way that adhered
to our values of trust,
because, you know, people come to the BBC
with high expectations.
- In order to take the
request from the user,
we're using Speech to Text technology,
and then in order to understand
what the user's intent is,
we use Language Understanding to map
what the user has said to a
set of intents and entities
that we've defined within
Language Understanding,
in order to pass that
request on to the right bot
within the Microsoft Bot Framework.
We've managed to build
our own brand identity
by using Neural Text to Speech.
- Working with the Azure
platform allowed us to,
you know, not just to synthesize a voice,
but to really fine tune that.
- We can be serious when
we need to be serious.
We can be funny when we need to be funny,
and we can maintain various
tones to our responses
in a very natural way.
- We're not a big tech firm.
We don't have that kind
of resource to build out
the entire complex AI technology
stack of an assistant,
and my team of great
creatives really appreciated
the flexibility and
the tools that they got
to be able to create those
sorts of experiences,
and do it relatively fast.
- The BBC's really been at the
forefront of responsible AI,
and it was integral for
us that we were able to
build the assistant in a manner in which
we felt we had full control
over what was happening
to audience data, and so that
we were therefore able to
treat that data in the most
responsible way possible.
And the experience with
the Azure technology
really gave us that opportunity.
Ultimately, this is something
that we want to expand
across the way in which the BBC interacts
with all of its audiences
around the world,
and across many different languages.
- It's about playing and discovering
our wonderful content, and it's also about
what does it mean to be
informed about the world,
to ask questions about the
news, or sports, or the weather,
or to be entertained, or to
seek out, you know, a laugh,
or to seek out music,
and discover culture,
as we do through our
programs, but in this new
conversational medium that
is, you know, voice and AI.
That has never been done
before, and that's exciting.